If I have my iPad and my iPhone synced through iCloud and I can see that my text messages are being received/sent on both. If I send an iMessage on my iPad and immediately delete the entire text thread on my iPad, does it in turn delete the text threat off of my iPhone? If not, does it show the iMessage I sent from my iPad?

Pretty much what happened was I was over my buddy's house and his iPhone and iPad are synced to iCloud. I am assuming this because he had been text messaging me all day and all of the most current text messages were showing on his iPad. I used his iPad to send a text message to my wife with some of our bank account information she needed.

I immediately deleted the text thread from the ipad (My wife also has an iPhone so I am assuming it was an iMessage).

My question is does this iMessage go to his phone still if I deleted it? Or does it delete from his phone because I deleted it from his iPad?

2 Answers
2

My experience is you cannot actually delete an iMessage once and have it delete elsewhere.

You can only delete the local cached copy of a message to suppress it being showed/stored on that one device. If you turn off iMessage and turn it back on, you will see the messages from iCloud come back whether you deleted a message or not.

I am not convinced that simply deleting a message from the Messages app on an iOS device actually fully removes that message from the device that you sent / deleted from. One time I got tired of having a long list of old messages conversations so I deleted all of them. A few minutes later I was searching for something via spotlight on the same device & it started showing messages results with no actual conversations left in the messages app itself.

The answer to your actual question is unquestionably NO. It will remain visible on another synced device until deleted from that device, and it may remain searchable via spotlight even after that. Although not the same per say, the concept could be thought of as being similar to a POP email account verses a IMAP email account. With POP the action that you take regarding am email once downloaded to some sort of application will not be reflected on the server. Checked a downloaded POP email on you I-devices mail app will not result in that email being marked as read on the server.

If you're worried about it, if its sensitive enough w information, I would go to each device, delete the message, go to the device's spotlight preferences & confirm that it is searching messages, and the perform a spotlight search using a word that may be specific to just that message. If nothing comes up I'd say you're reasonably safe. If it does show up you'll need advice from someone more knowledgable than me.